Bungie: Destiny Endgame Begins as the Story Ends, Explains Raids

It seems in Destiny, reaching the sci-fi shooter-RPG’s end is just but the start according to Bungie’s Luke Smith. Yeah, that might sound a bit odd, but here’s what he meant.

I think Destiny’s endgame begins as soon as you see the way the story ends…As soon as you see the way we wrap up the sort of first piece of the adventure that we’re going to tell because we want to set you back out into the world to keep going. We want to try to align your motivations as the player with the motivations of the character who you’ve been pushing around this world. So for us I think a bunch of the endgame starts right at level 20.

Just in case you didn’t know, Destiny will have “raids” as well, and Smith has, for the first time, spoken out about it and what it entails from the player. First off, raids in Destiny will be capped at six players, and will be limited to friends only — meaning it won’t support matchmaking. Also bear in mind that raids in Destiny are not like Strikes, which takes 20-60 minutes to finish, but will take a “couple of hours.”

The activity is going to take you and your group of five buddies into a place that you’ve never been…A place that you will return to frequently. And [it will] demand of you things you’ve never even really been asked to do in a shooter before.

Smith adds that he doesn’t expect a group to finish a raid in its first time through it, and explains how your character’s in-game level will help in how you tackle it.

One of the things we have never talked about – we haven’t really talked about raiding at all…One of the things we certainly haven’t talked about is that [raids aren’t] an activity that we expect you to get through the first time through.

Unlike a bunch of the other activities in Destiny, where you begin the activity – like let’s say you pick the level-22 Strike playlist – everything in that activity is going to be level 22. It’s going to be consistent. If you’re level 26, you’re going to have some relationship to it. You’re going to be more powerful than that activity. In a raid, when the raid begins at level 25, it’s not where it ends. Like part of going the raid is the journey of gearing up; building your arsenal to react to the situations that it’s going to ask you to go through.